[Wxdevide-devs] editor plugin and dialog

[Nuklear Z. <nuk...@gm...>]

i had an idea last night about the editor dialog. i keep thinking about it
because that is mostly in my domain, so i will most likely be the one doing
most of the work on it. (editor plugin i mean) if the editor dialog is built
into the ide and make generic/realistic enough for most any decent editor
solution, then all the extra editor specific stuff can be put in a different
gui element. either a dialog that is brought up via a menu item added to the
edit menu, or a notebook page that is appended to the editor dialog
notebook. which solution should be dependant on developers preference and or
the actual implementation. a few options can easily go into a notebook page,
a more complicated thing or multiple panels should be in its own dialog.

then we determine what options should go in what of three categories:
core
gray (or optional)
extended

extended is simply what is not in the other two.
core is expected from any plugin anyone wants to add. syntax highlighting
for example.
gray is an optional functionality, like line numbers and code folding.
i think that cursor past eol, eof needs to go into extended if the editor
supports it. to my knowledge, scintilla doesn't support it at all.

then dealing with the users settings, either:

*a structure with the core and gray settings is passed to the editor plugin
when the user changes them so that the editor plugin can just deal with all
of the settings itself.

*or the same thing, but the ide deals with the settings, but this looks like
a little worse solution because it will take more plugin bandwidth.

*or the settings are stored separately.


as an unrelated bit, my xp went to heck on me a couple weeks ago and some
one stole my installer cd. so i had to find xs's xp1 on the Internet again
to make a new one. what a chore. and finish up with my backup/housekeeping
stuff. finally done, very glad its over.

just before i had that issue, i was working on XSTC, and i finally fixed an
elusive bug in the configuration system. it kept crashing when it should not
have been called at all. turns out i put the variable initializer below the
config setup call in the constructor, all fixed yay! now i can get back to
working on the next release of XSTC like i should have been doing this whole
time.

i am also going to work on the editor plugin/dialog issue in a test program.
i'll create a mock plugin system to develop the api and do some
brainstorming. when the plugin documentation takes more form i will keep the
mock up updated so the api is usable in the ide. that way the current editor
stuff can be sorted out later when a good, ready to use editor is already
built. it will make things easier to keep track of. and keep my editor api
updated on the wiki.

do i have any major errors in thinking about this or is it a good idea?
opinions?

Nuklear